Gone like yesterday, p.20
Gone Like Yesterday, page 20
EIGHTEEN
It’s been a long time since Zahra has made this walk. The creek was more than a place to hop rocks, but even back then, there was something about it that entrapped the magic of her childhood—maybe the way it seemed to sprout from nowhere, like walking through a random backyard to Narnia, or Gram’s explicit rule they were breaking in visiting it. Things changed when she and Derrick got into the Evermount Magnet School for High Achievers, and there were no creek shortcuts to get there. Instead, they took the bus, two buses, one to a depot on Memorial Drive and the other all the way north, to Dunwoody, the white part of town. They didn’t think much of it then, how exhaustive the two-hour rides were, how polluting, how interesting to watch the brown lot of them shuffle off storybook yellow school buses, joining their white counterparts whose parents had the means to live in the better parts of the city. It’s 2019, and Zahra knows that the parts haven’t changed much, the white people still north of I-20 and the Black people south of it.
Zahra looks around and doesn’t see what’s so wrong with the south side, what’s so wrong with a little noise, what’s so wrong with a little energy. Who doesn’t love a good cookout? Who doesn’t want to feel like they’re in an actual community and not some sterile suburb? She laughs remembering wanting to live closer to school, remembering the first time she was invited inside one of those white homes and how she envied the space of them, the polish, the shine, everything just a bit newer, glossier, better than what was waiting for her back at home.
But the bus rides—they were long, and she and Derrick had to wake up damningly early in the morning, and if they missed the first bus, then Gram had to drive them to the Memorial stop and they stood the chance of missing the second one too. But also, the bus rides were where Zahra bonded with her best friends, Zee and Ruqayyah. Where she got her first experience with flirting sitting next to Chase, letting his arm rub hers, letting him rest his head on her shoulder or grip her knee like palming a basketball. And on her days of introversion, she slid into one of those brown cushioned seats, knees up so they pressed into the person’s back in front of her, and she listened to music on the CD player Uncle Richard got her for her thirteenth birthday; it skipped on the speed bumps. She closed her eyes, and the ride felt like floating, and the moths were there, but by then she’d grown accustomed to them.
She didn’t think of her ride as part of Atlanta’s growing pollution problem, didn’t see how the segregated neighborhoods created economical, but even better ecological despair. Now she breathes in Atlanta’s shitty air quality considering its fast and unbalanced growth, leaving northern parts of the city treeless and congested, the southern parts with aging and environmentally damaging infrastructure. Now she thinks of the many college essays she’s helped white kids write about saving the planet and recycling and composting and reducing waste and going vegan, and how she’s never once told them to add atoning for white flight and white metropolitan suburbs to the list. No, she nods her head to their rants, lets them live happily with seitan and cashew cheese instead. After all, they’re only kids. After all, their understanding will grow, dynamic, unlike the tree outside of Sophia’s house on Park Avenue. But will they ever really understand? she asks herself. Or is the tree more likely to?
* * *
—
Thank you, thank you, thank you, the parents say when their children receive Stanford and Tufts and Brown acceptance letters. I couldn’t have done it without you—her students echo their parents’ sentiments like screeching macaws. They give her Starbucks gift certificates and mugs with catchy phrases and terrariums with succulents deemed unkillable until they have browned and dried two weeks later. And she smiles, pleased with herself, genuinely happy for them, but with a lump in her throat that makes it harder and harder to swallow, the next kid’s bullshit won’t go down, the next kid’s silent but dedicated plea, Write it for me, write it for me, write it for me. Why should she write their stories, when she’s so lost in her own? She gasps for air, in corners, when their sessions are over, and no one else is around.
Now she hears footsteps behind her and turns around to find Trey running to catch up, waving his hands over his head, calling her name,
“Zahra. Zahra,” he huffs, and she smiles with her hands on her hips, anticipating the company, full of nerves and fervor, back to her schoolgirl self, to back-to-back bus rides with cute boys.
“Gram said I’d find you this way,” he says.
* * *
—
The creek is steady today, the water still fresh from the previous night’s rain. There are days when there’s almost no water at all, and the rocks that line the bed wait dry and crusty for the next downpour, the next storm.
“Gram didn’t like us coming down here,” Zahra says, remembering how they used to hop rocks; they were so young then and the water was so alluring, so magical.
“Why not?” Trey asks. “Seems safe enough. Weak current and all. Can’t you swim?”
Zahra laughs. “It’s not deep enough to swim in, though we would have if it were. I’m not a great swimmer, but I can keep my head above the water. I bet you’re practically a dolphin, coming from Trinidad.”
Trey shrugs. “I like the sand, digging my toes in it. And I guess I like the water too but not as much as the sand.”
Zahra nods. “I went to Trinidad once. With some friends. I was fresh out of college, and my new paycheck was burning a hole in my pocket. The water there is beautiful.”
“The best.”
“Yeah.”
“But this is nice too,” Trey adds quickly, and Zahra’s laugh shakes free the nerves that course through her. Trey smiles, goes on, “It’s a very American neighborhood. Like you grew up in a movie or something. The Forbidden Creek.”
Zahra sits down on the overgrown grass, grateful she changed into jeans. Trey sits beside her, a little closer than expected, and she has the urge to move away, but she puts her hands on her knees and brings them to her chest. She considers what he’s just said, what he’s just named this place, The Forbidden Creek, an appropriate title.
“I think Gram not wanting us to come out here had something to do with the missing children. A lot of them were found in or near the Chattahoochee. During a storm, this creek rushes, and it can seem bigger and scarier than it actually is.”
“Missing children?”
“Yeah. Happened before Derrick or I were born—’seventy-nine, ’eighty, ’eighty-one. In those few years, twenty-eight or twenty-nine Black kids, mostly boys, went missing—turned up behind dumpsters or in the woods, and then eventually, bodies in the Chattahoochee River. Floating. Washed up.” She tries not to think of Derrick’s body washing ashore, but her mind has been going to the worst places lately, and she sees him bobbing and bloated. She closes her eyes to the image and reminds herself that Derrick is not a child, that he is tall and heavy, that he’s aware.
“Derrick was obsessed with the murders for a while; I guess he felt some sort of kindred spirit with the boys, most of them around fourteen when they died. When Derrick got his license, he would drive out to those neighborhoods, across town, to Red Wine Road and Browns Mill Road and the Peachtree City corridor, over by the Omni.” Said he could hear them, could hear one boy in particular singing, and it would keep him up at night, and maybe the boy was trying to tell him something. She can’t say it all to Trey, but she wants to, wants the story off her soul, to stop it from crushing her. She remembers those days clearer than the rest, when Derrick would just sit out on Henry Thomas Drive and say the boy’s range was sick or not everyone can sing like that, not everyone at all.
“Why those neighborhoods? What would Derrick do there?” Trey asks, and his voice almost sounds like Derrick’s.
Zahra shakes the thought from her head.
“Because that’s where the boys were, where they lived, where they were found. He’d look around. Think. I’d just sit next to him, and it’s not like we’d be there for long, five or ten minutes, and he’d turn back around, come back over here, to the Eastside.”
It’s warm out, but Trey looks cold. He rubs his arms, and she thinks maybe she’s scaring him.
“Just a kid playing detective, that’s all,” she says, ignoring how dedicated Derrick was, how he named the voice Pat Man’s before they’d done any of their week’s long research at the library. How when she found Pat Man’s face in a newspaper, her eyes had practically popped out of her head, then they’d swelled with tears, and Derrick only said, “See I told you. I knew it.”
She’d always been afraid of Wayne Williams, the convicted murderer, though she, like almost everyone else she knew—Mom and Gram and Uncle Richard—weren’t sure he’d actually done it, thought maybe it was the KKK, thought they were always behind the evils of Atlanta.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Trey says.
“Let’s talk about something else,” she agrees, trying to push the impending memories from swelling.
“There are roads everywhere, and they just get bigger and bigger. Seems like there are a lot of places to go,” Trey says. “But then there are trees too, so it doesn’t always feel like a city. Nothing like Harlem.”
Zahra nods. “It’s definitely a city made for driving.”
“Yeah, I like it here.”
“You do?”
She moves her attention from the calm but steady water flow and looks at Trey. His eyes are beaming, and he’s smiling so wide that she notices the hint of a dimple, something she’s never seen on him before, left cheek, overwhelmed by full lips and large white teeth. He’s cleanly shaved today; she’s just now noticing that. On any other day she might push him away, convince him that she’s not interested, but something about today or the atmosphere, or the creek like a time capsule makes her different.
“What do you like most about it?” she asks him.
He shrugs, laughs a little. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” He pauses, seems to consider what he wants to say. Begins and then stops. Begins again. “I like that you’re the one showing it to me.”
She nods. “You’re good company too.”
“When was the last time you went on a date?”
“Ugh.” She laughs. “Don’t ask me that. That’s a horrible question.”
“But you look like you need one. You’re stressed, I get it. But even before, even before all of this, you just looked . . .”
“That’s enough. I get it. Thank you.”
“I didn’t mean to be . . .”
“I know,” she says, and it sounds curt, but she’s not mad. She is scared. She sees that she will let Trey get away with things that she would chop other men’s heads off for, and it’s not a relieving revelation but a terrifying one. “Are you like this with everyone? So prodding?”
“Not everyone. You. And Sammie; she needs it though.”
“She’s a cool girl. Wouldn’t mind being like her when I grow up.”
Trey nods, but it sounds like something else is on his mind when he says, “I’m worried about her.”
“Why?” Zahra asks.
“Ever know someone who sees too much, feels too much? Like they’re in two places at once? Like they can feel everything you’re feeling and what they’re feeling too? And if you have, ever wonder what that does to a person?”
The notion is so close to her own reality, to Derrick’s absence, that it stings. It’s so close it’s unreal. Her chest tightens, and she reaches for the water bottle she failed to bring. She opens her mouth to speak but doesn’t know what to say. She looks at Trey, and his eyes are dead set on her too, piercing, unwavering. He moves in to kiss her, and though she wants to move away, though she wants to run miles and miles away, she follows his lead, the creek’s water lapping low in front of them, their only witness.
NINETEEN
In the backyard, Rashad teaches Sammie how to pick honeysuckle and lick the nectar. He plucks a dandelion and tells her to blow it, make a wish and make it count. He says he doesn’t believe in wishes, that that’s not how the world works, but they’re fun anyway, and what did you wish for? Sammie won’t tell him, but she wished to find Derrick. She’ll do her best at praying on it before bed tonight because she doesn’t really believe in wishes either.
Rashad sits on the brittle grass, leans back on his elbows and gives her a look to follow suit. She does, even though she thinks the grass will be itchy, and she’s already got a handful of mosquito bites. She looks up at the clear blue sky and wonders what’s waiting up there. God or just cumulus clouds? God or just rich people in jets? Maybe it’s ridiculous to think of God as a man in the sky. He’s supposed to be everywhere, isn’t he? She looks at Rashad. His eyes are closed, head tilted back.
Sammie is bold. She is not herself at all when she leans over him. She wants to kiss him. She wants to lay on top of him, something she’s never done with a boy before. But when he opens his eyes, he startles her, and she backs off quickly. She sits up straight.
“Sorry,” she says.
“For what?” he asks, smiling.
“I don’t know.” She shrugs, picking at the grass at her sides, uprooting full chunks of it and then smashing it back down into the hard, dry soil.
“Sammie! Sammie!” It’s Uncle’s voice, calling out to her from above. She looks behind her and spots him on the patio. He looks worried. “I’ve been calling you,” he says, holding up his phone as proof. She looks at her phone, and sure enough, two missed calls. She doesn’t know how she didn’t hear it or at least feel the phone vibrating.
“Sorry,” she screams up at Uncle.
“Come inside,” he says. “You’re gonna get eaten up out there.” She thinks Uncle is being dramatic, that he just wants to get her away from Rashad, that he’s being overprotective. Still, she obliges.
“I’ll see you later?” she asks Rashad.
“Yeah, later,” he says. And she leaves him lying there, fully stretched out as if this is his domain, his own backyard, and he has nowhere else to be.
TWENTY
One month ago, September 2019, before he went missing, or by other definitions, gone
Derrick was nine when he realized he could swing his words, or the lack thereof, like a lasso. He learned when to pause, when to hold back completely, and when to string people along with a story so enthralling that they couldn’t help but ask him to repeat it. He began to think of his voice as a thing of harmony, a way of singing without singing, not so different from rapping, some brothas even called it that.
In high school, girls loved his way with words so much they’d use any excuse to touch him. A fallen eyelash. A piece of lint. Nothing but the sun hitting him at the right angle, and there’d be a hand on his back, his elbow, his shoulder. For the bravest, his face. But he liked it—their attention and their touch. It confirmed something—that what he said had value. And admittedly, he recalls being thoughtful and sensitive as a teen but also a subscriber of hip-hop idolatry—money, cars, clothes, with an emphasis on hoes.
But in most cases, he didn’t entertain girls for long because he simply didn’t like being responsible for their feelings. He began to see how words could be used against him, how they could be mistaken or misconstrued. And what happened when the feelings were mutual? Inevitably, he put too much weight on those girls, and his own thoughts and concerns and the merry-go-round of voices stained them.
To some degree, his inability to commit spread across other facets of his life—in finding a career. In moving to a new city or even signing a lease in the one in which he’d lived his whole life. It’s not to say other shit didn’t factor into his choices. Of course they did. He felt an obligation to Atlanta—a city that was changing too quickly for the people who rightfully claimed it to keep up. And there was a nagging too, not only from the moths but from the back of his own mind, that he wasn’t doing enough. He told this to church elders, to therapists, to life coaches, but none of them were able to get to the meat of it. Maybe they couldn’t comprehend anxiety by way of American history or were dealing with the same shit themselves and still trying to find the answers.
His college major, philosophy, with its emphasis on ethics and information management and the reason for reasoning itself, didn’t save him but only made his head denser than it already was. He researched answers and found some in Atlanta’s deforestation, gentrification, in its urban planning and redlining, in the things it tried to hide but they only found new places to resurface—like an old game of Whac-A-Mole.
Zahra was always mad at Mom, but to be honest, Derrick understands that she tried, was trying, her best. He thought he’d gotten a girl pregnant once, and his reaction to the news startled him. Here it went: Wow, how did that happen? Of course he remembers the how, but why? Why him? Why now? There were already enough voices in this world. What business did he have in bringing in another one? And into a suburb, a city, a country that wouldn’t do anything but bear down on a child with a million weights, a million unanswered questions.
A couple of days ago, he met a girl he really liked. The way she looked stirred his nostalgia, an easier time, those teen days of pride and power. He met her by the creek. He was there to get his mind off things, to listen to some music, to watch the water rush by, but she was just lying back on the grass, basking in the sun. She wore baggy low jeans and a backward A cap. A jet-black bob and fluttering, thick eyelashes. She waved long neon fingernails as she spoke.
He asked her, “Just taking it all in, huh?”
“I guess you could say that,” she said, coming up on her elbows to look at him better, then bringing one hand up to shield her eyes from the sun.
“You from around here?”
She looked like it, but it wasn’t like girls from around here to just sunbathe.
